Now That's Hardcore

Finally, an RPG with the balls to DELETE YOUR SAVE FILES. This is one of the first screens you see when you load up Pillars of Eternity, an isometric role-playing game by Obsidian that will be out later this year for PC.

While this isn't the first time we've seen this sort of "hardcore" mode — Diablo II introduced a similar feature way back in 2000 — -it's fun to see it in a deep, sprawling RPG like Pillars. Imagine losing your save file after 100 hours of exploration and conversation.

The backer beta for Pillars of Eternity launched last night, and a representative for the game's publisher, Paradox, was kind enough to send me a code. I haven't played much yet, but from what I've seen so far, Pillars is basically Baldur's Gate 3.

Hardcore Diablo 3 too, which is semi-RPG'ish. Idk why people would want to do this though. You could just choose to delete the save yourself if you died. I played Resident Evil heaps when I was young, and in doing the no-save thing for ranks/rewards, I died once or twice after spending hours playing... not the greatest feeling in the world lol

Bah! You kids today make all this fuss about perma-death, that was just how we rolled back in my day! You died, you were sent straight back to the start of every game! Hell, we didn't even have save files! And we had to walk 16 miles in the snow to get to our nearest game shop! Uphill BOTH ways! *shakes fist*

"So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. "Gimme five bees for a quarter," you'd say. Now where were we... oh yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. I didn't have any white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...."

Back in my day we didn't even have game shops, we had Myer and KMart and Big W and the hock shop on the corner. We hired games from the video store at $8.50 for an overnighter then returned it, hoping that when we got it out again someone hadn't deleted out file. Our lives lasted as long as we had dollar coins spare! *shakes fist more vigorously than @scruffy*

But taking a page out of Diablo 3's history, playing hardcore whilst online and having 250 ping (from Aus to NA servers) was a huge problem. In particular there was one day back in the early days of the game where Blizzard servers had a spike for just a minute, but it was enough to make many hardcore players lose their progress, all at no fault of the player.

Story time! I went to an all-girls’ school. My friends and I had that special bond of closeness that apparently comes with synced-up periods and measuring the length of each other’s winter leg hair.
This, obviously, led to a brief era of trying to catch one of the others unawares with the most impressive, most unexpected spank possible. We’re talking sneaking up behind each other in the hallway and laying one down that made the earth shake. If I couldn’t read your palm from the imprint, you weren’t doing a good enough job.